People often use maps to plan and guide them during travel. Where the origin and destination are known or selected, a route can be traced on a street map and/or presented as textual directions. Traditionally, travel agencies, car rental firms and automobile/travel clubs provided paper maps or map booklets of region(s) to be traveled along the route, with highlighting to indicate the recommended travel route.
Map applications were developed for personal computers that offered similar capabilities utilizing a local database of map information. The computer's user interface allowed the user to input points of origin and destination, and possibly points of interest along the way. The application program would retrieve information from the database to construct a display of a map, overlaid with a route between the origin and destination. The personal computer typically offered an option to print out a copy of the resulting route map. Similar route mapping capabilities have been developed for on-board vehicle navigation systems and/or handheld GPS type navigation devices.
More recently, on-line services, like Mapquest.com, have offered map and direction capabilities via the Internet. Such services utilize a client-server communication paradigm. Essentially, the mapping database resides on a server coupled to the public Internet. A user establishes a communication session through the Internet, and client browser software enables communications with the server. Via the client browser, the user can identify a point or location, and the server returns map data for displaying the selected location. If the user operates the terminal device to identify a point on the map, the browser sends the selection to the server and the server returns a related map display, e.g. a version of the map zoomed in on the selected point. The user may also input origin and destination information, and the server will return map data showing the route between the points and textual directions for travel between the points.
The user interface capabilities of the on-line services for mapping routes and/or providing travel directions, however, have been limited. Existing on-line services, designed to map and plot routes require the user to enter some amount of address information. This address information could be in the form of a full address or may be just a zip code or city/state combination. The point is that some sort of address information is required, for both the starting point of the route (origin) and the ending point (destination) of the route. While such an approach is convenient at times, there are situations where a user may prefer a quicker or more convenient solution for inputting information about one or the other or both of these key points of reference.